Pages

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Live from... Cornwall, Ontario

Funny that I write this post today, when in reality I arrived on Wednesday, and I'm leaving in a few hours. But well, I had other things to do...

I'm in Cornwall, Ontario, just an hour and change West from Montreal. I'm here for work, obviously.

These are my impressions about this city, and please forgive me if I say something that is completely wrong or I give out wrong information; it's just my perception. It somehow reminds me of a golden rule we have at "Argentina Deportes", a mail group I belong to, in which the only requisite to talk about a soccer game is not having watched it. :-)

Cornwall is a 'typical' border city. What do I mean by that? Well, it's a city that is deeply affected by its location. You could say that it has no identity, but maybe it resides on its uniqueness. You see, it's not only a city that in the CDN-USA border, it's also very close to the Ontario-Quebec border. If you ask me, there's a bigger social and cultural impact when you go to Quebec than when you go visit our neighbour to the South. Due to this, Cornwall not only has to deal with two different cultures and life-styles, but with three. When I turn on the TV, for example, I get one third of TV stations from US, one third from Canada (in English) and the remaining third from Quebec (in French). Nothing decent to see, though.

This city seems to have adapted to what the needs of the people driving by are. There are no big cities on the other side of the border, so I guess that those who drive into here are looking for a few specific things, like food and shelter. There are a lot of restaurants and fast food joints, and a decent number of hotels and motels for a city this big (or this little). I bet there's a casino somewhere too. The place looks like... a big plaza. It's funny because we used Cornwall as an example of a hardly glamorous assignment, and my manager would 'threaten' to send me... and here I am.

But well, it's not that I get to see a lot of the city. I'm either at the hospital or crashing in my hotel room. Things went very well and I'm going home today, as I said. This job is giving me the chance to know different places, but most importantly, a lot of people who are way smarter than me, so I can only learn by being around them!